I personally like using a squeeky toy. There's something about a red squeeky Santa or one of those green frogs with the big eyes. It makes the big bucks go wild.

Sorry. I didn't sleep well last night. That was the best I could think of.

Seriously, the key here is to stop thinking about how to change their behavior. You will have a hard time making them do anything. Instead, the trick here is to first find them, and then adapt your hunt to the conditions you find. Remember to that deer do not just disappear during the daylight. They exist in Time and Space. It may be they have gone somewhere that is hard to hunt, or somewhere that is disagreeable to hunt, but they are still there.

Around our place, the red cedars provide the bulk of the hard-to-hunt cover that the deer like. They pick either standing thickets or blown down debris for bedding during high-pressure times. It is wickedly hard to go in after them, so about the only thing you can do is hunt the travel routes. There is no "making" them come out.

It goes back to the basics: Find the beds, find the food source, draw a line between the two. Hunt along that line.

"Seriously, the key here is to stop thinking about how to change their behavior. You will have a hard time making them do anything. Instead, the trick here is to first find them, and then adapt your hunt to the conditions you find. Remember to that deer do not just disappear during the daylight. They exist in Time and Space. It may be they have gone somewhere that is hard to hunt, or somewhere that is disagreeable to hunt, but they are still there."

Take shaman's above quote and engrave it in stone. It can't be said much better than that.

Actually, I kind of like the bit with the squeaky toy. Can't you just see some guy out there in his red-checked coat, his Elmer Fudd hat and a red Santa squeaky toy? And the big buck sneaks up on his back side and steals it from him and then goes cavorting off into the woods with it in his mouth. From the depths of the impenetrable cedar thicket, all you can hear are thundering hooves and "SQEEEEAKY! SQEEEEEEEAKY!" until there is a final loud "BOOOM!" and through the thicket, we see our intrepid hunted standing over his kill, stuffing the red Santa toy into his pocket, and coming back out with his jack knife.

I know this is getting WAAAY off topic, but I once went on a guided goose hunt where the guide actually wore a "goose suit", and went out INTO the decoy spread, flapped his "wings" and called as a faraway flock was passing by. I could not stop laughing until we had to stand up and shoot! It actually worked!

Ya know, this conversation reminds me of one of my pet peeves. A lot of this is ancient history, but it has relevance today.

Waaaay back when I first started hunting, I had all these "Tips and Tricks" garbage floating around in my head. It was from a lifetime of reading outdoor mags. They'd tell you things like:

Smoke Menthol cigarettesSmoke a pipe with either apple or cherry flavorCook your lunch out in the woods. . . and my all-time favorite: play a radio really low on some easy listening station.

Truth is I think half of this stuff was just detritus made up to make copy and fill the magazine. However, the rest came from guys who were just getting used to the modern era of deer hunting. Remember, there was a good generation or two between the end of unregulated deer hunting and the start of the modern seasons. So it made sense that guys experimented with everything, and if Uncle Fred had been listening to the football game when a deer came out, next thing you knew the whole camp was carrying radios.

How this has relevance today is that we are still relying on this type of thinking. I mean what about the idea of big bucks traveling with their nose to the wind?

It all makes sense that you should hunt the stands that are downwind of where the deer are coming, but that kind of goes out the window when you suddenly realize that that in The Real World, everything is upwind from something else and deer come from every direction.

Or take UV or Scent-proofing or ( I know, don't get me started on UV. It now taking 3 days and heavy medication before I can settle down) . You get ideas that buying something will dramatically improve your hunting. I'm sorry, there isn't much out there that is going to replace putting boots on the ground. Certainly not secret spray to rid yourself of invisible rays or a glorified overpriced rainsuit.

Here are the big tips and tricks I've gleaned from 30-some years:

1) Find a place that has deer; (This is the biggest. I spent many seasons hunting places that had almost no deer.) No poop? No deer. No track? No deer.2) Find out what they eat, where they bed, and hunt the direct line between.3) If you complete #1 and #2, study the situation. Scout out similar situations and Wash Rinse Repeat.4) Deer are completely ruled by their stomachs. They have to get up and move, poop, eat and go back to their bed to ruminate every few hours or they get very uncomfortable. This idea that bucks become nocturnal or that deer stay bedded through a 3 day blow is complete hogwash. They feed 4 times a day: Sunup, Sundown and equally spaced episodes in between. 5) Keep yourself and your clothes clean. (see my weblogregarding baking soda)6) There is no replacement for scouting. I am with my deer and turkey nearly every weekend of the year except the deepest parts of the winter and summer. 7) Killing deer is easy. You put a bullet in their chest and they die. You can add any sort of challenge to it you want (bow, pistol, ML, blindfolded, one arm tied behind your back), but still you are doing the same thing as throwing up a 30-06 and plugging them. Do not let method get in the way of success.

I can probably think of more, but these are pretty common sense things. If you solve 1 and 2 above, you're probably going to figure out the rest quickly.